By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, February 24, 2019
Foreign-policy intellectuals have worried about a
possible confrontation between South Asia’s nuclear powers, India and Pakistan,
since the two engaged in tit-for-tat bomb tests in the late 1990s. As the
nationalist government of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi weighs its
retaliatory options after a mass-murder attack by Jaish-e-Mohammad — a
terrorist organization based in Pakistan and sustained by the Pakistani
covert-operations service — there is talk of open war on both sides, and more
than a little anticipation of it.
Such a conflict would not serve U.S. interests and should
be prevented if possible.
In a sense, India and Pakistan already are at war — a
slow, grinding, desultory one rather than an open and more terrifying one, but
one that is no less dangerous for that — and that danger extends to American
interests, which are not limited to the prevention of a nuclear exchange in the
region.
The United States is, at the moment, exhausted by its
overseas military commitments, and the ruling presumption of our domestic
politics is that every dollar spent on U.S. military commitments from
prosperous Germany to disintegrating Syria could be better spent filling
potholes in Sheboygan or funding a new national corps of babysitters. The
United States is at this very moment attempting to disentangle itself from that
part of the world as an Afghanistan campaign of nearly 20 years’ duration comes
to its unsettling conclusion.
Entanglement is easy. Disentanglement is tricky, as the
Trump administration’s recent decision to partially reverse its earlier
decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria shows.
The question of U.S. interests and attitudes in South
Asia is complicated, not least by the fact that our national-security posture
toward the subcontinent remains, for reasons of institutional inertia, too much
informed by outmoded Cold War calculations aimed at containing a Soviet menace
that no longer exists and hasn’t for a long time. India’s “nonaligned” posture
during the Cold War made it a limited-purpose Soviet client state, which
encouraged the United States to build up (and attempt to quietly manage)
Pakistan and its military apparatus.
That no longer serves our interests and has not for some
time. After a 2017 meeting with the U.S. secretary of state, Pakistan’s foreign
minister bemoaned the “trust deficit” that existed between the two nations,
which is a nice way of saying that the United States knows that Pakistan’s
intelligence service, the ISI, tips off jihadists in Afghanistan and elsewhere
to help them avoid U.S. actions, that it is knee-deep in jihadists instigation,
that Pakistan provided safe haven to the Taliban and other jihadists, and that
the Pakistani government siphons off U.S. aid money to fill up the bank
accounts of its politicians and, in all likelihood, to help fund covert
operations such as the recent terror attack against India. President Donald
Trump has complained that the government of Pakistan provides the United States
with “nothing but lies and deceit.”
Pakistan’s current prime minister, Imran Khan, is a
cricket-player by profession. He is a relatively liberal Oxonian but one who is
easily bent by the mandates of Pakistani politics, which now include both
assuaging Islamists at home and also the need to satisfy demanding patrons in
Riyadh and Beijing. In 2017, India attempted to have the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammad
placed on the UN’s designated-terrorist list, a move blocked by China. That
kind of help comes at a price. It is not pleasant to think what opportunities
China might discover in an all-out war on the subcontinent.
India, in contrast, is the most natural of U.S. allies,
and not only or even principally because of its robust democracy and
increasingly global economy. The facts on the ground are this: India is a
country with China on one side and a world of bloody-minded jihadists on the
other; its two most consequential foreign-policy variables are also our own.
Here are some other variables: India’s armed forces are
hampered by logistical inadequacies and other challenges associated with the
country’s dysfunctional and overly bureaucratic government, but its army is
twice the size of Pakistan’s, and it enjoys an advantage in everything from
artillery to air power to its (modest) naval capacity. That advantage has given
rise to the “Cold Start” doctrine, which holds that if open war with Pakistan appears
to be inevitable — and who knows what that
means in New Delhi? — then the most effective strategy would be to immediately
overwhelm Pakistan and reduce its military forces to inaction before the
government can order a nuclear strike. But that is a tall order: With Chinese
assistance, Pakistan has developed a mobile short-range nuclear-missile
capability specifically to discourage a “Cold Start” assault.
That means a roll of the dice that would not in the
interest of the United States.
The time has come to cut Islamabad loose and recognize
Pakistan for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism. That the Pakistani state
(and some Pakistani territory) is not entirely under the control of the
Pakistani government and its elected leaders does not change the facts of the
case. The United States should give Islamabad a date certain by which to get
its act together or face sanctions under the relevant statutes.
The Trump administration should offer this to Modi in
exchange for keeping India’s troops — and India’s missiles — on India’s side of
the border.
If, in turn, Imran Khan and his government require
international help in doing what needs doing, then a good-faith effort by
Islamabad would certainly enjoy broad support, and not only from the United States.
But Pakistan’s troubles run very deep: They are bred into its institutions and,
to some extent, into its national political foundation, which is rooted in the
belief that Muslims can truly flourish only in a polity in which Muslims
predominate. The very different evolutions of Pakistan and India since 1947
give the lie to that belief, but Pakistan would not be the first nation to be
governed by a lie.
The question is not whether there are American interests
at stake. The question is whether we will pursue those interests on our own
terms and under our own initiative rather than react to events beyond our
immediate control.
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